


oceans and streams

by indications



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-26
Updated: 2012-07-26
Packaged: 2017-11-10 18:33:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/469367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indications/pseuds/indications
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>my world had a place in it, darling, just for you.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	oceans and streams

**Author's Note:**

> LOOK I'M POSTING ANOTHER ONE WHY THE FUCK NOT

There was a time he was called leader, and giggle as she might, guise as she would his orders as good advice, she followed him. Things are simpler, now. _We were so young_ , she would say, if he recalled directing her like an equal, even a superior. _We were just wrigglers_.

They are older, now. And to look at them, from afar, with human eyes, not much has changed. It would be easy to say she does not behave like royalty, tiara off-center in her hair, her smile wide and cool as the deeps. That her command over him is only titular. He raises his voice, and she does not silence him. He argues, and she is patient. He curses, he grumbles, he is glubbing impudent and still, she does not rebuke him! She allows all these things, for he does more for her than any audience will see.

He kneels, and he takes his due.

It was all show, knighting him, but the humans liked it. The title was his already. Skinny, gilled queen of a young alien race, in tyrian and gold. The cameras flashed light off the white of her fangs. Royalty, as they expect it. Karkat gets red-and-silver epaulets and a sickle in his belt. Feferi, queen, empress, sovereign, gets good publicity.

It might have been her predecessor, if they hadn’t ended that world themselves. _Might have been_. Feferi had designs, even then, on her ancestor’s throne, but they will never know what would have become of them. What would have become of Karkat’s own ambition, which has remained the same: always, humbly, to serve.

The glory and machismo are what he wears publicly, Her Majesty’s Knight – the only Threshocutioner in the _world_ , indeed, until the mother grub Kanaya’s raising has grown enough to bear the queen legions. He is brash and short-tempered and fierce, and though it must never come to blood with human dignitaries, it is always clear that he would cut down any opposition of Her Majesty’s will with no more remorse or hesitation than threshing wheat. (It sounds grander, in Alternian, the pledge – _to reap Her enemies as the grain of the field, that She consume them_ – and how her heart thrummed in her chest as he recited it. There was a time when she couldn’t have pictured him bent to one knee, her soldier, murmuring oaths. It would not have occurred to her to imagine it.)

But bend, he does, and murmur; hers, only hers, always hers.


End file.
